Susan Lohan at Temple Hill House, a former holding centre in Dublin: ‘We were not unwanted children – our mothers’ sexuality was unwanted.’
Photograph: Johnny Savage/The Guardian The outspoken ‘A nun called me a destroyer of lives’: how adoption rights activist Susan Lohan fought the Irish establishment Adopted as a baby, denied any information about her natural parents, Lohan has spent years fighting for the church and state to reveal what they know – about her and the thousands of others in the same position

A “destroyer of lives”. That is what a nun called adoption rights activist Susan Lohan when she sought answers from the religious order that brokered her adoption. Instead of being given the truth, Lohan was told not to ask questions. She was born in 1964 to one of thousands of unmarried mothers forcibly separated from their children – usually women who had no choice but adoption due to their circumstances. In the mid-60s in Ireland, up to 97% of all children born to unmarried mothers, like Lohan, were taken for adoption, mainly by the religious institutions and agencies that controlled social services and opposed reproductive choice.

The married couple who adopted Lohan were loving parents, unlike some families in the past who took in children to use as free labour. A housewife and a shoe salesman, they were the rosary-reciting ideal of Catholic Ireland and their religious devotion would have been necessary to adopt a child. Couples needed a priest’s approval to adopt and sometimes even proof that they couldn’t have children biologically. Lohan’s adoptive parents were told that her mother had died in childbirth but they were sceptical. Lohan always had an image in her mind of her mother as an unmarried girl, too young to keep her. She later found out that her mother had been in her 30s at the time, a civil servant who became president of a trade union. “She was not a woman who was easily intimidated,” Lohan says. “And even she felt unable to resist.”

Lohan now helps to run the Adoption Rights Alliance (ARA), which she co-founded more than a decade ago with fellow adoptees and activists Claire McGettrick, also adopted from an Irish Sisters of Charity institution, and Mari Steed, one of the “banished babies” adopted from Irish institutions to the US. The ARA campaigns for the estimated 100,000 adopted people in Ireland to have an equal right to their identity and information. Her Twitter photo backdrop shows her with Philomena Lee, whose experience of separation from her son through a mother-and-baby institution was made into an Oscar-nominated film, Philomena, in 2013.Adopted people in the UK have had access to their original birth records since the 1970s, but Ireland is only now on the brink of recognising adopted people’s legal right to this information, a change promised and denied many times over. Under current law, if adopted people are able to access records relating to their life before adoption, original birth names and the names of natural parents are treated as third party information and redacted.

Lohan was about 21 years old when she met her mother, Nábla, for the first time. A social worker with the religious-run adoption agency made contact with Nábla and arranged and oversaw their meeting. At first, says Lohan, her mother had a stern demeanour but, as soon as they started talking, all that fell away and her mother spoke candidly. When Nábla had discovered she was pregnant, she was already maintaining the family home alone and supporting her brother studying overseas, as her own mother was dead and her father had left. There was no support for Nábla to keep her daughter – there was no welfare for unmarried mothers until the 1970s and, even after that, many were evicted or lost jobs if it was discovered they had children out of wedlock. So she was referred to St Patrick’s Guild, the adoption agency run by the Sisters of Charity. “We were not unwanted children,” says Lohan. “[Our mothers’] sexuality was unwanted. Their self-determination was unwanted.”

In 2017, Lohan joined thousands taking to the streets to protest against the state’s decision to build a new national maternity hospital on grounds owned by the Sisters of Charity. “How could you do this to the women of Ireland?” one placard read. Protests for public ownership of the hospital continue and, at a recent demonstration outside the government buildings in Dublin, organised by the Our Maternity Hospital Campaign Against Church Ownership of Women’s Healthcare and supported by the National Women’s Council of Ireland, Lohan spoke out against what she sees as the Irish state’s plan to give influence over a publicly funded institution for reproductive health that could cost €1bn to the same religious order that separated her from her mother. While the nuns say that they will have no influence over the hospital and that they are transferring ownership to an independent entity, and the state says the deal includes legal stipulations to guarantee all medical procedures allowed under Irish law will be provided, concerns remain that staff will have to abide by a religious ethos, putting the provision of abortion services and other treatments at risk.

After their meeting, Lohan’s mother still kept her existence a secret and withdrew from contact for about four years until her death from cancer in 2000. “It broke my heart,” says Lohan, who was in her mid-30s at the time. “I think that was my first realisation that I had been grieving the loss of my mother my whole life.” At her mother’s funeral, the priest spoke of “an additional sadness, because she was a single woman with no family of her own”. Lohan felt like screaming, not only at the untruth, but at the unending stigma.

The state’s adoption authority was equally unhelpful. Lohan describes how an official flicked through her file and assured her that she could “take comfort from the fact that your adoption appears to be legal”. For her, this was proof that “the system knew what the system had got up to”. Years later, having received no information about her father, she was meeting with an official from the adoption authority when he left her alone in a room with her file (she believes deliberately), which allowed her to find her father’s name. She went on to discover that her father had died in the 1990s, while she was searching for him. It would take her until 2016 to establish for certain that she had siblings.

It was an email group set up by the Ireland-based Adopted People’s Association that first sparked Lohan’s wider activism. Other Irish adoptees would message the group about their experiences of stonewalling from the religious orders and state agencies that held their records. In 2001, while working for an investment bank in England, Lohan joined the association as a campaigns manager, getting to know countless mothers and adoptees in the UK who were separated by Ireland’s system. That year, she helped lead a successful political campaign against a bill that would have criminalised people adopted in Ireland for contacting their natural parents, punishable by a year in jail or a fine. In 2005, she was part of the advisory group launching the National Adoption Contact Preference Register, an initiative to enable people separated through Ireland’s adoption system to voluntarily register their interest in receiving information or contact.

As an “avid critic” of the church and the “inhumanity” of how it has treated some of the most vulnerable in society, Lohan wants to see an end to religious influence over Ireland’s schools, hospitals and public services. Where she lives in Dublin, there have been calls to increase non-denominational education. About 90% of primary schools in Ireland are still under the influence of the Catholic church, even when publicly funded. She wonders how many more children will have to be born in Catholic-ethos hospitals and attend Catholic-ethos schools because the church will not relinquish influence and the state will not ensure alternatives. As such, she believes religious orders are still treated as “above the law”.

Source: The Guardian

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